As most people following this blog have probably figured out by now, I’m pretty much calling it quits. I’m really grateful for the past few years I’ve had writing here, and in particular for the readers who have taken the time to write to me and to comment — your support and appreciation has meant more than I can say.

My writing in general has been put on hold because a number of other projects have taken precedence. Overall, it’s been a really positive thing for me to step away from this (and other writing projects). I’m now fostering relationships with people I love, learning new skills, becoming stronger and healthier, feeling challenged in really positive ways, and returning to things I’ve set aside for far too long. With writing (here and elsewhere), I’ve always felt a certain pressure — I feel positively guilty when I’m not working on something, not creating something. Right now, I don’t feel that sense of guilt. It’s very freeing, to be able to enjoy something and not immediately feel compelled to document it.

…but I know I can’t avoid that feeling for too long, of course. I already feel the pull back to a screenplay I wrote a first draft of a year ago. I’m reading a fantastic book on a pet subject of mine, and I inevitably turn to thoughts of interviewing the author for a magazine I’ve written for in the past, of perhaps even writing a follow-up book on the subject incorporating some new ideas and…no. Not now; not yet. Now I need time for day-to-day life, for friends, for playing games and music, for collaborating with others, for having fun, for absorbing ideas and words instead of generating them.

I might return to this some day. In particular, I’d love to return to the zine format and come up with “Issue 2″ of Subversive Submissive. Right now, though, it’s time to put this aside for other things. Thanks again to everyone who’s read this over the years, and don’t hesitate to email me if you’d like: subversivesub at gmail dot com. So long.

I haven’t posted anything in two months, for the simple reason that I just haven’t felt like writing about sex. I’ve been struggling to narrow my goals as a writer, and I’ve realized that in order to get anything done, I’ll need to stop writing multiple blogs and zines and novels and screenplays and reviews and pick just one or two things to focus on at a time. And I’m not sure if writing about sex and kink is going to be among them.

My reasons for continuing this blog are completely different from the reasons I started it. When I first began writing here, all I wanted was to give voice to the thoughts I’d been wrestling with for so long and to find support from others who thought like me — to find reassurance that I wasn’t alone. Thanks to this blog and that support from everyone who’s read it over the last few years, I’ve gotten exactly what I wanted: I no longer feel overwhelmingly ashamed or afraid of my desires; I feel confident in my sexuality; I have a better understanding of different BDSM subcultures and histories and can articulate both defenses and critiques of them.

About a year ago, I realized that my blogging had a secondary goal: to be the source I’d hoped to find when I went looking for intelligent, radically minded kinky folk, and to reassure others that they were not alone. I started receiving a number of comments and emails from people expressing gratitude for my thoughts, my stories, and my openness. At the same time, I began to put more energy into Anarkink — organizing meetings, ensuring our presence at the San Francisco Anarchist Bookfair, and helping to plan a party. I created a FetLife group for kinky anarchists; I printed a zine; I received several requests for interviews. I began to realize that my identity as a writer was now overwhelmed by “Subversive Submissive,” and that the only real work I was producing that was being read by others (except for the non-credited writing I do as a part of my job) was my personal reflections about kink and sexuality.

I’m in a quandary. I enjoy writing on here — I do still find it interesting (and often cathartic), and it seems that others still find it somewhat helpful to read about my struggles with and thoughts on kink. I really like having the connections with other kinky bloggers that I’ve made over the past few years, and I miss the cross-blog conversations that I used to take part in on a more regular basis. But kink is simply not as enormously fascinating to me now as it was even a year ago; it’s now simply a normal part of my life, not something new and exciting that I want to process, dissect, analyze, and share with others. And the more I grow into my identity as a writer, the more I realize that I don’t want to be a “sex writer” — and that practically speaking, anyone who frequently writes about sex, even if she writes about many other things as well, runs the risk of being pigeonholed as such. My reasons for anonymity are several, but one of them is definitely my fear that connecting my real name to my writing on here will mean that I will forever be resigned to a role as “that woman who writes about kink and anarchism.”

So I have a lot that I need to figure out, right now. I don’t think I’m quite ready to stop writing here, but I need to find a better balance with my other interests and to decide whether or not I need to quarantine my writing about sex from everything else I share with the world. Here’s looking forward to finding the answer in 2010.

It’s not as if I haven’t gone a month without posting before…but this time I have a good reason: National Novel-Writing Month! This is going to be a huge challenge for me — not so much the challenge of writing at least 1,666 words per day to reach the 50,000-word goal, but the challenge of plotting out a novel-length story, creating characters, and so forth. (Fiction has never been my strong suit.)

“Individually — and thus in a strictly temporary way — we must learn how to sustain roles without strengthening them to the point where they are detrimental to us. How to use them as a protective shield while at the same time protecting ourselves against them. How to retrieve the energy they absorb and actualise the illusory power they dispense.”

— Raoul Vaneigem

Print Zine

Now available in zine form! Check it out at the Zine Library: click here. Collects rewritten and expanded versions of several essays/posts, plus a bit of new material.